Top cop commess and suspect politics

FROM a certain vantage point, the failure of this country’s leadership to correct the manifest deficiencies of the process by which commissioners of police and their deputies are appointed is mysterious.

But recent events have dispelled the mystery.

They have painted a picture of not only a constitutional selection process but also an entire political system vulnerable to corruption – if not already corrupt – given its admixture of governance and policing.

It is a toxic mix which evidently continues to hold our politicians tightly within its grip.

The proof of this continues to unfold.

In the same week that a UNC MP is hauled to court on charges relating to parliamentary perks, prosecutors withdraw a corruption case against a former UNC attorney general and a former UNC senator.

The issue of whether the star witness in that case was improperly induced – which would constitute all manner of breaches – emerges, given disclosures about the conduct of a former PNM attorney general, as well as an increasingly long list of government ministers now named in reports of behind-the-scenes machinations.

The Prime Minister has tried to downplay implications for and the involvement of his Cabinet.

Yet the picture painted is of a group of officials who, in apparent pursuit of political rivals, routinely invoke claims to morality while riding roughshod over the law and its spirit, the separation of powers and the decorum once associated with high office.

Dr Rowley has no formal knowledge of being subject to a reported probe by the Anti-Corruption Investigations Bureau (ACIB) – itself a chequered agency – in relation to matters which police perhaps know best.

A link has been made with the collapse of an independent body that has oversight over the commissioner of police – the very official who, theoretically, leads the ACIB, and, theoretically, heads efforts to investigate matters relating to corruption in public life.

At stake, plainly, for both the PNM and the UNC in the matter of the appointment of top cops are the spoils of effective custody of the police.

It is no coincidence that the Police Complaints Authority and the Integrity Commission, which could subject officials to independent oversight, remain toothless.

When the prime-ministerial veto was removed in 2006, it was replaced, we can now clearly see, with a system that results in a de-facto merger between parliamentary and police power.

When people vote, they vote, it seems, not just for a PM, but for which politicians they wish to see in jail and which officials they wish to put them there.

That is an intolerable perversion of our Constitution which both sides – and only both sides – can, and must, now end.